games OR money

[shootthebandit]

i was having a thought the other day about the entertainment industry and i was thinking about the 'artists' involved be it a musician or a game developer they all face one problem.

the problem is a morale one. Do you create something because you enjoy it or do you create something because you know its a safe way to make money. it is for this reason we get a mass of generic modern shooters and medeval RPGs. Art requires a certain creativity and originality. Theres so many producers out there fuelled by greed e.g EA, Activision and ubisoft. there needs to be more people like the guy who made minecraft and the guys at media molecule (creators of little big planet). people like this push the boat out because they are making games that they want to make and end up making money in the process. its the same with any art, if you form a band to become famous your music will be hollow and commercial but form a band and make a song you can honestly admit you like personally then you have achieved so much more

 

[Anarchemitis]

Some companies make games to make money, because they're so big that they must make money. EA is one such company; for many of its employees, making games is just a line of work for a paycheck, and they're not necessarily interested in forwarding the medium as an art.
Obviously such a generalization is not entirely absolute, but it is true for some. When their ability to make video games is on the scale of more than 5 very large studios, its hard to get the tighter, more personal aesthetic that you'd find in games developed by less than 30 people. Like Meat Boy, or Team Fortress 2.

 

[shootthebandit]

you make a good point, the gaming industry needs to grow. it needs to allow amateurs to create good content. the tools need to be more widely available.

 

[Sixcess]

Big companies make big games that cost big money to produce. A major company is going to be very reluctant to invest tens of millions of dollars in an innovative game that might not sell, because let's face it, gamers say they want new games, but the big sellers tend to be sequels to established, enjoyable, but generally unoriginal franchises.

It's a business first and foremost, and a very expensive one. Producing a triple A video game is far more costly than producing an arthouse movie or publishing a literary novel, and so innovation will continue to come from the indie studios, for much the same reason that mega-budget movies rarely push the push the boundaries of cinema.

All we can do as consumers is try to encourage and reward good, original games, by talking them up in forums like this one so that other people find out about them, and most importantly, by buying them so that the studios can afford to make more like it in the future.